How’s Your Rest Ethic?

By Sameer Kawash

Dedication to hard work is great, but how’s your dedication to rest? Our culture, and especially certain careers in our society, place great value on hard work, pushing through, and sucking it up when you’re tired. Resting is often treated as a luxury, or even as a sign of weakness.

But more and more evidence shows our capacity to work hard, no matter the task, is dictated as much by our resting as by our training. While many of us take pride in a strong work ethic, perhaps it’s just as important to develop a strong rest ethic.

The Lesson from the Ring

One of the strongest, toughest people in the world learned about the strength and power of rest the hard way. In 2016, UCF champion Conor McGregor was on the rise, a heavy favorite to beat Nate Diaz. McGregor lost. In the second round, he visibly ran out of gas and Diaz overwhelmed him.

The story goes that when asked if he was training harder for his next fight, McGregor answered “No.” He determined his exhaustion wasn’t from a lack of training, it was from not enough rest. In spite of his intense training, his lack of sufficient rest left him unable to train at the level he needed to boost his cardio fitness. So, no amount of additional training was going to get him there.

The Foundation for Performance

What McGregor learned, and what’s so often overlooked, is that rest is the foundation for better training and higher performance, whatever the task. Fortunately, we can apply this lesson to life outside the UCF ring. If we replace the word “training” with “work,” we can consider the value of rest to enhance performance, and even satisfaction, in whatever work we do. Training for a marathon, taking on overtime, building a deck at home. These are just a few examples of work that benefits from focused, hard effort and pushing through discomfort.

But without enough rest, those training runs will be too slow, the overtime will be dangerous, and that deck won’t be square. The lesson isn’t that we shouldn’t work hard or train hard. The lesson is that a work ethic without an equal rest ethic will undermine the hard work and probably leave you defeated.

Getting Restorative Rest

In the fire service, most tour schedules already follow a version of focused hard work followed by rest, or at least not-work. One problem is firefighters often use their time off of work to do other work, some of it not so restful. But instead of focusing on how much you’re working, or “over” working, consider if you’re really resting. And in this case, time with family and friends, and even alone, can be an important part of restorative rest. When a family is fraying because one spouse is almost never home, notice that the remedy is time at home, not just a reduction in overtime.

So take a look at your training, your work, anything you put your time and energy into. Are you rested enough that you can really give it your all? By focusing on rest, you reorient your point of view. If a strong rest ethic is your foundation, then the work you do, the training, the overtime, the deck, whatever it is, that work will yield greater results. You come to the work truly restored, ready, and energized. You can work harder, with more focus, and more awareness of your performance and limits.

Here’s a slogan you can use to build you and your community’s rest ethic: “You can’t overtrain, but you can under rest.”